With Inbox Health, Lansing Urgent Care gained more control over the patient financial experience, reduced paper statement burden, and created a billing process that better reflected the care experience patients had come to expect.
With Inbox Health, Lansing Urgent Care gained more control over the patient financial experience, reduced paper statement burden, and created a billing process that better reflected the care experience patients had come to expect.
Lansing Urgent Care, a multi-site urgent care organization serving the greater Lansing, Michigan area.
Eight clinics, approximately 200 employees, and a ninth location planned in Holt.
Patient statements were paper-heavy, difficult to customize, unclear for patients, and disconnected from the organization's brand experience.
Inbox Health modernized patient billing communications with digital-first delivery, more flexible statement design, payment options, and support touchpoints.
Greater control over the patient financial experience, significant reduction in paper statement volume and cost, fewer visible patient complaints, and a stronger foundation for KPI tracking.
Through the move to UrgentIQ, which the team refers to internally as UIQ, Lansing is gaining additional integration-driven efficiencies, including elimination of a 40-hour-per-week manual payment posting role.
Lansing Urgent Care has spent nearly two decades building a different kind of urgent care experience for patients across the greater Lansing, Michigan area. Founded by husband-and-wife team Dr. Terry Matthews and Catherine Matthews, the organization grew from an idea for a more accessible urgent care model into a multi-site operation with eight clinics, approximately 200 employees, and another location underway.
The organization has long differentiated itself through a patient-centered brand, operational responsiveness, and a willingness to listen closely to both patients and staff. That matters in urgent care, where patients often arrive stressed, time-constrained, and evaluating the experience across every step of the visit.
For Hillary Myers, Senior Executive Director of Operations, Marketing, and Growth, that patient-centered identity is personal. She has been connected to Lansing Urgent Care since its earliest days, helping build the brand before later joining the organization full time. Her role now spans operations, marketing, growth, vendor strategy, and the everyday problem-solving required to keep a busy urgent care organization moving.
That breadth of responsibility is familiar to many healthcare leaders. The work is not just selecting technology or managing projects. It is protecting staff capacity, preserving patient trust, supporting ownership decisions, keeping operations moving, and making decisions with imperfect data while the next challenge is already arriving.
For Lansing Urgent Care, one challenge had lingered for too long: the patient billing experience did not reflect the quality of the rest of the patient journey.
Lansing Urgent Care had worked hard to create an urgent care experience that felt efficient, approachable, and aligned with patient expectations. Patients could register online, move through care quickly, and leave with a strong impression of the organization.
But after the visit, the billing experience felt disconnected. Statements were difficult to customize. Patients had limited control over how they received bills. Much of the process remained paper-based. The patient portal was not functioning the way Lansing Urgent Care needed it to. And the statements themselves did not provide enough detail for patients to easily understand what they owed, what insurance had paid, or why they were receiving a balance.
The issue was not just cosmetic. It affected patients, staff, and the organization's brand. When a patient receives a statement that lacks detail, the next step is often a phone call. If they cannot understand what they owe, they are less likely to pay quickly. Some may not pay at all. Others call the billing team for clarification, adding volume to a team already managing claims, rejections, denials, payment posting, insurance follow-up, collections preparation, and research-heavy billing issues.
For many healthcare organizations, this is where billing becomes more than a revenue cycle issue. It becomes an operational issue. It becomes a staffing issue. It becomes a patient experience issue.
At Lansing Urgent Care, the billing team was already under pressure. Operational inefficiencies in the broader environment had forced the organization to add billing resources over time. Hillary described moments when the team simply could not keep up with the volume of work and inbound calls.
That is a reality many leaders in Hillary's position understand well. The solution often starts as a workaround. Add another person. Create another manual step. Try to band-aid the process. But over time, the organization looks up and realizes the workaround has become the operating model. For Lansing Urgent Care, that was not sustainable.
The most important challenge was not only that billing was inefficient. It was that billing did not feel like Lansing Urgent Care.
Hillary and the Lansing Urgent Care team had built a brand around accessibility, warmth, responsiveness, and listening. The organization used patient feedback to shape the care experience. But the patient financial experience was lagging behind.
That disconnect mattered. The statement was often the last touchpoint a patient had with the organization. Even if everything else went well, a confusing or off-brand bill could become the lingering memory.
For Hillary, that was the core issue. The billing experience was not aligned with the rest of the organization's standards.
Even the visual experience created concern. The statements did not fully reflect Lansing Urgent Care's branding, colors, or identity. Hillary said they looked disconnected enough that she herself would have questioned them as a patient.
For a healthcare organization, that kind of friction matters. Billing already comes at a sensitive moment. Patients may be confused about coverage, concerned about cost, or frustrated by out-of-pocket responsibility. If the statement does not feel trustworthy, clear, or connected to the care experience, the organization risks losing both payment momentum and patient confidence.
Lansing Urgent Care began looking for a better way to manage patient billing communication. As a long-time user of its previous urgent care technology environment, Lansing had established workflows and deep operational familiarity. But the organization also recognized that the patient financial experience needed to evolve.
The team wanted more than statement generation. It needed greater control over the experience. It needed customization. It needed digital communication. It needed patients to have options. It needed a process that could reduce confusion instead of creating more work for staff.
With Inbox Health, Lansing Urgent Care could move from a basic statement process to a more structured communication workflow. Instead of simply generating a bill and waiting for the patient to respond, the organization could think through cadence, messaging, payment options, escalation, and support.
That shift was exciting, but it also required Lansing Urgent Care to build a process that had not really existed before.
For healthcare leaders, that feeling is familiar. A better system can open new possibilities, but it also forces decisions the organization may not have had the ability to make before. What should the message say? When should it go out? How should the tone change if the patient does not pay? How do you remain professional, clear, and compassionate while still driving action?
Hillary credited the Inbox Health team with helping Lansing Urgent Care navigate those choices.
With Inbox Health, Lansing Urgent Care gained the ability to offer a billing experience that better matched how patients expect to engage today.
Patients could receive communication digitally, click a link, complete simple verification, review their balance, and pay. They had more choice in how they received bills, including digital options instead of defaulting to paper.
Inbox Health also gave Lansing Urgent Care more control over statement content and communication design. Patients could receive more useful information. Lansing Urgent Care could present the bill in a way that felt more consistent with its brand. And the organization could offer support channels that did not depend entirely on the internal billing team.
That mattered because every billing question that can be answered clearly, digitally, or through a supported workflow is one less interruption for staff trying to keep claims and payments moving.
Lansing Urgent Care is still building out the KPI reporting it wants for a full before-and-after analysis. That is another challenge many healthcare leaders understand: sometimes the prior environment makes it difficult to extract clean baseline data.
Inbox Health gave Lansing Urgent Care the ability to shape the patient financial experience with the same intentionality it brought to registration, care delivery, discharge, and follow-up.
Instead of leaving patients with a confusing, off-brand final impression, Lansing Urgent Care could create a more consistent experience from registration through payment.
After moving to Inbox Health, paper statement generation, volume, and cost declined significantly.
Patients gained more control over how they received bills, including digital options that better align with modern consumer expectations.
Hillary noted that she had not personally received complaints from patients who interacted with Inbox Health.
Fast support and an easy-to-navigate dashboard helped Lansing Urgent Care get answers without adding more work for a busy operations team.
| Before Inbox Health | With Inbox Health |
|---|---|
| Paper-heavy statement process with limited patient choice. | Digital-first communication with patient preference for delivery channel. |
| Statements lacked detail, creating confusion about charges and insurance payments. | More customizable statements with clearer information and stronger patient context. |
| Billing experience felt disconnected from the Lansing Urgent Care brand. | Patient financial experience better aligned with the care experience and brand standards. |
| Patient questions added call volume to an already burdened billing team. | Additional digital and support touchpoints helped reduce dependence on internal staff for every billing question. |
| Limited baseline visibility into performance and collection metrics. | Stronger foundation for tracking KPIs such as collection rate, time to payment, paper reduction, ROI, and support volume. |
For Lansing Urgent Care, improving patient billing was not simply about collections. It was about delivering an experience that reflected the organization's values.
Urgent care is a competitive market. Patients have options. A single misaligned experience can send someone elsewhere the next time they need care. As Hillary noted, the patient relationship in healthcare is personal, and expectations are high.
A confusing bill can feel like a misstep, even when the clinical care was excellent. That is why Lansing Urgent Care saw patient billing as part of the brand. The organization had spent years creating an urgent care experience that felt more approachable and more responsive than what patients had historically expected. Inbox Health helped extend that philosophy into the financial experience.
After more than six months using Inbox Health, Lansing Urgent Care began a broader technology transition, including a move to UrgentIQ, which the team refers to internally as UIQ. While the first phase of work with Inbox Health focused on improving the patient billing experience, the next phase is about creating more efficiency and visibility across the full revenue cycle workflow.
That transition is already creating meaningful operational improvements.
In Lansing Urgent Care's prior environment, the team did not have the level of integration needed to fully automate certain payment workflows. As a result, the organization had to create a manual process to keep systems aligned.
With the move to UrgentIQ and its billing infrastructure, Lansing Urgent Care is now gaining additional efficiencies through a stronger integration with Inbox Health. Instead of relying on twice-weekly file-based workflows and manual posting, the organization can move toward more automated, daily statement and payment workflows.
That improvement has already allowed Lansing Urgent Care to eliminate the need for a 40-hour-per-week manual posting role - effectively removing an FTE-equivalent manual burden from the workflow.
For Hillary, that efficiency gain is part of a larger effort to get the organization out of reactive mode and into a more data-driven, proactive operating model. Lansing Urgent Care is now working to formalize the KPIs it wants to track going forward, including patient collection rate, time to payment, paper statement reduction, return on investment, call volume impact, patient support volume, and the relationship between billing communication and internal staff capacity.
The organization is also reassessing the patient billing experience now that the new infrastructure is in place. After a year with Inbox Health, Lansing Urgent Care has a stronger foundation to ask more advanced questions: What is the current patient experience? Where can communication be improved? Which questions can be answered through digital support? How much work can be shifted away from staff without sacrificing patient service?
That next phase matters because Lansing Urgent Care is continuing to grow. With eight clinics, a ninth location underway, and approximately 200 employees, the organization needs workflows that can scale without requiring every operational challenge to be solved through additional headcount.
For Lansing Urgent Care, the value of Inbox Health has evolved over time. First, it helped modernize a patient billing experience that no longer matched the organization's brand. Now, as Lansing Urgent Care moves into a more integrated operating environment, Inbox Health is helping support the next layer of efficiency: faster workflows, less manual posting, clearer reporting, and more control over the patient financial experience.
Lansing Urgent Care had already built a patient experience that reflected its mission: accessible, timely, thoughtful care for the community it serves. But its patient billing process had not kept pace.
Statements were unclear. Paper volume was high. Patients lacked choice. The experience did not feel aligned with the brand. And every confusing bill had the potential to create more calls, more staff burden, delayed payment, and a weaker final impression.
With Inbox Health, Lansing Urgent Care gained more control over that final touchpoint. The organization created a more customizable, digital-first, patient-friendly billing experience that better matched the standard of care it had built across the rest of the business.
The broader lesson is not simply that billing needed improvement. It is that every touchpoint matters. For Lansing Urgent Care, Inbox Health helped make that alignment possible - and as the organization moves into a more integrated technology environment, that alignment is becoming a foundation for additional efficiency and visibility.